Apparatuses and methods hereof relate generally to air diffusing and water misting apparatuses and/or methods and systems thereof, and more particularly to apparatuses or devices that can be used to diffuse air and water in a residential or commercial setting, to distribute or disperse a misted stream of water, typically of tiny water droplets, into the air and thereby cool the local environment. Deflected flows including in some examples, spiral or other non-linear flow may be achieved hereby as well.
Evaporative cooling involves the evaporation of a liquid, often in the surrounding air, cooling the surrounding air and thereby the environment in which the liquid has evaporated. One very basic example of evaporative cooling, sweat, involves the body's secretion of what is primarily water, which evaporates off the body and ultimately cools the sweating person. In the context of the present development, the liquid that will evaporate is projected into the ambient air in such a manner that it readily evaporates, cooling the air and environment into which it is projected.
The principle of evaporative cooling is put to use in a number of applications for cooling ambient air. Small-scale evaporative coolers, sometimes called swamp coolers or sump coolers, can be used in residential and certain commercial settings. Wet cooling towers and air washers also use the principle of evaporative cooling, but for different purposes than evaporative coolers. As is relevant here, one application of the principle of evaporative cooling is the misting system.
A typical misting system will involve water forced through a high-pressure pump and tubing through a nozzle with a narrow orifice, creating an exceptionally fine mist at the egress point of the nozzle. The mist contains water droplets so small that they may flash evaporate, absorbing the heat from the air, and reducing the surrounding air temperature rapidly and dramatically. Such a system may be mounted away from the final target area, to cool the air at the target area without necessarily exposing the objects or people in the target area to the mist. Such a system may be used indoors or outdoors.
The various devices and/or methods for dispersing water in a stream of air, some of which are illustrated above, may have to be tailored to the particular application. Due to the nature of some of the devices and/or methods, some do not offer appropriate control over the stream of water or the placement of the various components of the apparatus. In many such situations, these prior methods require undue modification to avoid, i.e., inadvertently getting the occupants of the environment unduly wet.